[mlpack] Greetings and selecting a first issue

[Ryan Curtin]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2019 at 07:31:19PM -0500, Sunanda Gamage wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> My name is Sunanda and I'm a PhD student at Western University, Canada. My
> research is on using machine learning methods for network traffic analysis
> (detecting intrusions/ other events). Before grad school, I was a developer
> for 3 years writing back-ends of stock exchange systems in C++. Writing
> elegant and performant C++ code is something I love, and I can see that
> mlpack is a code base full of such code.

Hi Sunanda,

Welcome to the community!  Great to have someone with your experience on
board.  I think that the finance and stock exchange communities value
efficient implementations about the same as we do, so I think we are on
the same page. :)

> I'd like to be a contributor to this project, and I have read the pages on
> getting involved, gsoc, GSoC Ideas and Design Guidelines. I've also
> compiled and run some example code and gone through some of the API
> documentation.
> 
> I was going to get started with a "good first issue", but many have been
> taken up by developers who have not commented on them in a few months. Is
> it OK if I work on one if these and try to open a pull request? I was
> thinking issue #1152: the fastmks test.

I'd love to see the FastMKS test finished.  There's already a PR open
for it: #1356.  But it hasn't been touched in a long time.  You could
start there and finish it out, or, you could write the code from
scratch.  Either is just fine with me.  We're getting pretty close to
fully finished with #1152; I'm hopeful that the last few tests get
merged in the next months.

If you put together some code, I'll review it when I have a chance.

Thanks!

Ryan

-- 
Ryan Curtin    | "I like this game."
ryan at ratml.org |   - Coach